He knows it. He expects it. To a point, he understands it, even if he doesn’t agree with the fate that awaits him.

This isn’t really his Blue Jays team anymore. Josh Donaldson remains in Florida working on plyometrics. Aaron Sanchez is in Florida starting on Thursday night in a rookie Gulf Coast League game. Troy Tulowitzki is who knows where. J.A. Happ is in New York on another team with hand, foot and mouth disease. Lourdes Gurriel Jr. is working on a hopping, jumping progression — honest. And the newest Jay, Brandon Drury, is the latest to make his way to the disabled list with a fractured hand: Guess he just wanted to feel part of the team.

And there was Gibbons Tuesday afternoon, where he always is, holding a bat on the field at Rogers Centre, having been alerted to an unattributed and rather odd account that this would be his last week as Blue Jays manager, saying he’s heard something about the report and knows nothing of it.

He would be shocked if this is his last week on the job or his last homestand — that is likely to come at the conclusion of this wayward season ­­— and it won’t be his doing. He’s not about to make it easy for Jays management.

They’re going to have to fire him, pay him for the final year of his deal, and he will walk away, somewhat unhappily, from the greatest job of his life, and head elsewhere to remain in baseball. He’s not ready for retirement yet, although managing this kind of team could certainly push you in that direction.

His best-before date, though, is approaching quickly. The roster will be changing. The rebuild will begin. A new manager will almost certainly be here for next season. Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins will have great difficulty finding anyone of Gibbons’ quality to manage the Jays into the future: There are few of those in any sport, in any town, at any time.

There is a finish line for all managers, and that’s just a requisite of the job in baseball. There is a built-in finality to the position. The strange truth on Gibbons: He’s probably never managed harder or better than he has this season — just with fewer results and a team Joe Maddon couldn’t win with.

“Sometimes you make the right moves and they backfire on you,” the self-deprecating Gibbons said in his pre-game office gathering. “Sometimes you make the wrong moves and you come out smelling like a rose.”

The Jays trailed the Red Sox by only 27 games heading into Tuesday night’s series opener. There are 50 games still to play. A hot week or two and you never know, the Blue Jays can get that number down to 25.

Statistically, the Jays are the oldest team in baseball. The Red Sox are the ninth-youngest team. The discrepancy between teams isn’t about to change for a while.

Yesterday, general manager Ross Atkins and Gibbons met, as they often meet.

“Right now, Gibby and I are having conversations about our future and about solutions and improvement and getting better every day,” said Atkins.

That’s what GMs and managers do.

“Was there any conversation about him leaving?” Atkins was asked.

“No,” he answered rather emphatically.

And yet there was a cryptic — if not odd — report on sportsnet.ca about Gibbons not lasting to the end of the homestand, being replaced in the short term by bench coach DeMarlo Hale. The report was written not as a news story but as a note near the end of a Jeff Blair column, which is a rather odd place to put this bit of news, even if it’s a Rogers writer scribbling about a Rogers team.

If Blair was certain of Gibbons’ demise, he would have led the piece with the news, not buried the lead in this case. A journalist of his experience and quality knows better than that — but clearly someone from Rogers told him something.

What exactly was said, what was meant, what eventually will happen remains unclear.

But, with certainty, we can say this is Gibbons’ last season managing the Blue Jays. Don’t expect anything this week or next week.

This team is broken. The broken players are broken down. The manager has been dealt an impossible hand and will pay for everything that didn’t happen around him.

Waiting to the end of the season would at least show Gibbons a modicum of respect. That much he deserves.

For no good reason, his staff took a huge chunk of Trudeau’s feminist and reconciliation bona fides and ran them through the woodchipper

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